Maya Man’s self-help mantras are designed to make you cringe

By in Photography

Maya Man’s self-help mantras are designed to make you cringe

The internet artist’s debut book FAKE IT TIL YOU MAKE IT is out now

23February 2024

“When did it become so deeply embarrassing to be a woman?” This is the question LA artist Maya Man, aka @mayaontheinternet, asks in the introduction to her debut book, FAKE IT TIL YOU MAKE IT. The title is a reference to the hyper-feminine self-help mantras that dominated Instagram between 2017 and 2020 – the sort of Glossier-coded, millennial pink aesthetics that’s synonymous with the internet’s girlboss era, and which has since fallen into the pits of internet cringe. “I became really fascinated with this as existing in the lineage of media that it feels almost instructional,” she shares. 

FAKE IT TIL YOU MAKE IT capitalises on this disarming bubbly aesthetic, typical of social media wellness culture, through a series of computer-generated artworks presented as motivational aphorisms to be shared on grid. Man’s algorithm comes in six delightfully girly layouts – Wavy Baby, Mood Swing, Glossy Block, Snack Tray, TMI Text, and Main Character Energy – and though the format appears deceptively simple, there’s something off about the byte-sized mantras: “SCARE THE PEOPLE THAT FOLLOW YOU”, “PSYCHO GIRLS ARE NEAR” and “MANIPULATION IS INFINITE”. In attempting to mimic the language of wellness influencers, it appears that the algorithm is faking it, too.

As an internet artist, Man’s output usually spans multiple channels both on and off-screen, and this is very much the case with FAKE IT TIL YOU MAKE IT, which began life as an exhibition on the blockchain platform Art Blocks in 2022, before making its way onto Instagram on @fake_it_till_you_make_it_lol and even has a dedicated website. Now with the release of the book, Man has also opened an exhibition at Heavy Manners Library in LA, though this, too, takes an unpredictable form as a gift shop with actual motivational merch to purchase – think teddy bears with phrases like “DUMB SOULMATE” and thongs that instruct you to “JUST VIBE”. 

“This endless reproduction of FITYMI imagery only deepens its conceptual performance,” she writes in the book’s opening. “The joy I find in seeing the work morph into a wide variety of containers inspired my desire to pull it off of the screen and into the material object you are currently holding.” Below, the internet artist talks being a girl online, the social media wellness industrial complex, and the joys of tourist gift shops.

So FAKE IT TIL YOU MAKE IT – what’s the thinking behind the name? 

Maya Man: It’s the title of the generative art collection that the book focuses on and I struggled a lot to choose the right title at the beginning. I was watching a video by Mina Le about the culture around self-confidence, and the necessity to be confident, which is very closely tied to the ideas that I’m focusing on in the piece. She had this moment where she says, ‘everyone always says, something like, fake it till you make it’, and that phrase stuck with me, because I’m really obsessed in my work with this dichotomy between ideas of fake and ideas of real, and the whole project is centred around this algorithm that is essentially mimicking real outputs on Instagram that people have hand-designed. The algorithm is mimicking those and essentially faking it so a sort of dual meaning for me, where it’s a phrase that a lot of people use to talk about self confidence in day-to-day life, but it also relates to me, it relates to the fact that it’s an algorithm-driven project that’s faking its own knowledge.

You did your own coding, right? How does the algorithm work?

Maya Man: It’s funny, the project came out in 2022 and the book just released in February 2024 and the landscape around AI has changed so much, but the piece itself is actually not AI in the way that people think of ChatGPT. It’s actually just JavaScript files, it’s a much less intelligent system compared to ChatGPT, because it’s a collaging language. I essentially have different sentence structures where there are blanks and you swap out words at random to fill in thse blanks. That’s why it sounds absurd but also sounds very close to the way that these graphics usually sound as well.

You write in the book, ‘when did it become so deeply embarrassing to be a woman?’ All this is so tied up with millennial girlboss discourse, which feels so deeply cringe now. Why do you think that is?

Maya Man: This whole project stemmed from a frustration I had with that idea of feeling that it’s embarrassing to be a woman. I was feeling that really strongly in the years leading up to the project, looking at these graphics and looking at the sort of aestheticised necessity of not only living your life in a certain way, but having everything that you believe sort of aestheticised in a specific way as well. This relates a lot to the girlboss trend, where that was so much about traditional metrics of success and essentially mimicking a lot of success within capitalism of being CEO and working all the time but it was painted in these pastel aesthetics and then seen as feminism. Then, following that, there was the That Girl trend that everyone was talking about a couple of years ago.

But all of this, to me, is very cyclical. There’s always been this idealised way of performing femininity. When I was younger, I felt like I was internalising that through things like Seventeen Magazine or Teen Vogue. That type of media doesn’t operate in the same way anymore, so to me, these Instagram graphics I became interested in were really representative of That Girl mindset. It was a form of communicating a way that someone, especially women and young girls, should be living. 

There’s been a definitive shift in the past couple of years from That Girl to something more online-coded, like I’m thinking of all the coquette girlies on my Explore page. Where do you think we’re at now with being-a-girl-online speak?

Maya Man: I feel that the collection FAKE IT TIL YOU MAKE IT already feels like an archive of a moment in time and a specific aesthetic that became really popular for a few years, I would say mostly between 2017 and 2020. The aesthetics that were popular at the time reflected very direct to consumer brand aesthetics, like Glossier or Buffy, like how these millennial brands were all about pastels and bubbly fonts. There’s been a turn toward a sort of messier, high-chaos internet aesthetic that’s popular, but the pendulum always swings, and what to me is really constant about all these different repackaged aesthetics is this desire to believe that the internet can save you in some way in the way that you want. People are listening to subliminals hoping that listening is going to change the way they look or improve their grades or something positive will happen in their lives because they’re spending time online engaging with this media. 

Similarly, the FAKE IT TIL YOU MAKE IT graphics are sort of these quippy sayings that people feel if they like them, if they save them, if they comment on and remember them, then their lives will potentially change for the better. And so it’s this kind of desire to almost cast spells on the internet.

“There’s always been this idealised way of performing femininity” – Maya Man

One thing I was drawn to is this idea of bringing these online artworks into a physical space, like with the gift shop. What was the thinking behind that? 

Maya Man: I completely agree. I’m very non-precious about form when it comes to the way my digital file-based work appears. Because I make a lot of websites as art objects, or I’ll make these generative collections, like FAKE IT TIL YOU MAKE IT where I have these images that are output or some have motion. But I’ll share them on a website, and I’ll also post them on my Instagram account. But also over time, as much as I’m the biggest advocate for art on the internet, I’ve realised that people’s attention spans online are never going to be what they potentially are in-person. So, I’ve started valuing more and more taking the digital work that I make off-screen and morphing it into a physical form that feels right for the project. For this, it felt really nice to be able to make a book people can live with and spend time with. 

I love the gift shop aesthetic. 

Maya Man: I‘ve always been drawn to these pop culture forms, like gift shops. These accessible, ‘low-brow’ pop culture forms. I was walking down Canal Street in New York’s Chinatown, walking past all these gift shops, I love them so much. I would go in and buy things all the time, because it’s inexpensive, and it’s also so fun in there. And then I started thinking that this would be the perfect format, to morph this language into physical form.

I had this exhibition planned and the initial instinct and sort of the obvious thing to do would be to make prints of the work and kind of hang them in a nice way. But I started to get really excited about pairing different language with different objects, depending on what the what a single output said, like having that on a teddy bear or a tote bag in a way that makes sense with the connotation of the phrase. Yeah, so it was really fun putting it together and having people interact with the work in that way.

How do you see the relationship between your ‘self’ and the ‘self’ you perform online? 

Maya Man: I don’t really believe in the separation between online and offline self. I think that’s something that people have been really plagued by, with the conversations that happen around ideas of authenticity online. I don’t believe it’s possible to be truly authentic in this romantic way we talk about it online at all, because everything online is performance. And once I started to accept that, and believe that, it became much easier for me to post online, because I wasn’t trying to convince myself that I wasn’t performing.

To me, the internet has become like air – it’s just everywhere. Even when I’m not on my phone or computer, I spend so much time so much of my life online. My work is all about the internet, and this performance of identity, so my relationship between this idea of online and offline self is very fluid. 

That said, there’s a really intense concentration of identity that happens when you post online because you can hyper-curate, and over-obsess over how you’re appearing to other people. And that’s something we all do. But for me, it’s become part of this directed performance. Not in a fake way, but just in an honest way that I’m always thinking about an audience.

There’s been such a heightened awareness around the algorithm and its role is shaping our online behaviour, which makes me think: how much of our online performance is for us, and how much is for the machine?

Maya Man: It’s really challenging to tease out, like, what I feel ownership over versus what is the algorithm as worms in my brain guiding everything that I do. I was reading this piece by Dena Jago called the ‘Content Industrial Complex’.  She has this provocation of shitposting as a form of resistance. I think the definition of shitposting has changed a lot over time, but there’s something about that idea that really resonates with me, because it implies this sort of a legibility. It’s very challenging to do because so much of the way that we use these platforms has been conditioned to optimise for the algorithm. This also relates back to FAKE IT TIL YOU MAKE IT because, when I post these graphics on Instagram, I never say that it’s generated. Sometimes people find the account and think I’m super weird.

Internet aesthetics used to be imply resistance against the institution, but now it’s a commonly accepted aesthetic. How has the role of the internet artist transformed? I also think there’s so much bad internet art out there right now, it’s becoming harder and more overwhelming to cut through the noise.

Maya Man: Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts on this. Well, in general, I feel really strongly that contemporary art should reflect contemporary life and contemporary experiences. Historically, internet art has always been pushed to the outside of the traditional art world. Primarily because of the medium and also because it’s really difficult for people on the internet to be able to sift through all of the artwork that’s being made, to be able to connect and find to connect with and find something that really resonates. But I feel really strongly about about seeking out and finding artists who are making work about the internet because this is people’s lives now. We’re spending most of our time online and our entire social universe is being shaped by how we live on these platforms. I think it’s really important that are made at this time reflects that.

Is there anything you’ve been particularly obsessed with online recently?

Maya Man: There’s this artist Michelle Ellsworth and she had this ongoing project called the motivational video archive. She’d been doing it for 20 plus years. She would upload these videos of her and there’s this kind of like motivational music in the back and it’s always her trying to motivate herself. But they’re always about these really specific scenarios, where it’s like, you killed your neighbour’s fish, or she’s an artist, so she has a lot of them that are like, ‘you’re not done’, which is just one that I really relate to as an artist.

FAKE IT TIL YOU MAKE IT is out now

Orlando photographer wins top prize in international contest

By in Photography

Orlando photographer wins top prize in international contest

While plenty of Central Florida photographers seek out rocket launches for stunning visual imagery, Pascal Fouquet goes out of his way to incorporate Orlando landmarks into the frame.

While juxtaposing foreground and background, he’s captured rockets launching out of Volcano Bay, the spire at Plaza Live, through downtown Orlando and above the Eatonville sign. During a launch of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy carrying the X-37B spaceplane into orbit, Fouquet captured the rocket silhouetted against a full moon, boosters blazing with more than 5 million pounds of thrust.

The stars (and moon and rocket) were in alignment on Dec. 28, 2023, for the 30-year-old to snap an award-winning frame from Titusville, about 14 miles away from the launchpad. Fouquet’s photo placed first in the United States for the 2024 Sony World Photography Awards. Over 395,000 images from more than 220 countries and territories were submitted for this year’s contest, according to alphauniverse.com.

Pascal Fouquet is an Orlando-based photographer who captures rocket launches with Central Florida landmarks in the foreground, such as Hoods Up on Robinson Street. (Courtesy Pascal Fouquet)

“The second I got into photography, I wanted a cool shot like a rocket going through the moon,” he said. “It was a lot of patience and waiting for the right time, the right weather and everything.”

As the United States national award winner, Fouquet will receive Sony digital imaging equipment and will be included in a book and exhibition showcasing winning images, which will be on display in London this spring.

The Orlando-based photographer of Haitian descent has long been interested in gazing upward at things that can be spotted in the sky.

Pascal Fouquet stands with his Nikon D850 at Colonel Joe Kittinger Park in Orlando where he frequently photographs planes and rocket launches on Feb. 21, 2024. (Patrick Connolly/Orlando Sentinel)
Pascal Fouquet stands with his Nikon D850 at Colonel Joe Kittinger Park in Orlando, where he frequently photographs planes and rocket launches. (Patrick Connolly/Orlando Sentinel)

“I do plane watching, bird watching and rockets. Anything in the sky, that’s my specialty,” said Fouquet, who works as a safety analytics manager by day. “I want to keep photography fun. I’ve seen so many people burn out on the hobby they love or their passion because they made it their life.”

While photography has been an interest since 2019 when Fouquet’s sister gifted him an SLR camera, recently, he has found new outlets for showcasing his work, including the College Park Gallery, Gallery MCO at Orlando International Airport and the City of Orlando’s Black History Month exhibition in the Terrace Gallery.

Pascal Fouquet is an Orlando-based photographer who captures rocket launches with Central Florida landmarks in the foreground, such as the Plaza Live spire. (Courtesy Pascal Fouquet)
Pascal Fouquet is an Orlando-based photographer who captures rocket launches with Central Florida landmarks in the foreground, such as the Plaza Live spire. (Courtesy Pascal Fouquet)

“My life went from 0 to 100 real quick with my hobby,” he said, giving credit to his friends and the Central Florida arts community for encouraging him on his journey. “I’ve been putting myself out there more. I was trying to keep my photography local. Now it’s international.”

Fouquet’s normal spot for hanging out and spotting planes, rockets and other celestial objects is Colonel Joe Kittinger Park on the western side of Lake Underhill.

“I think it’s one of the most unique spots in Orlando. You have the planes landing at MCO and Orlando Executive Airport,” he said. “You have the moon and the sunrises too.”

Pascal Fouquet is an Orlando-based photographer who captures rocket launches with Central Florida landmarks in the foreground, such as Volcano Bay. (Courtesy Pascal Fouquet)
Pascal Fouquet is an Orlando-based photographer who captures rocket launches with Central Florida landmarks in the foreground, such as Volcano Bay. (Courtesy Pascal Fouquet)

The typical tools of choice for the photographer’s work are a Nikon D850 and a Nikkor 200-500mm lens, both of which he purchased from Colonial Photo & Hobby. Along with hard work and having the right equipment, getting an award-winning shot is also a matter of luck and timing.

“It was one of those once-in-a-lifetime chances where everything worked out,” Fouquet said.

Pascal Fouquet is an Orlando-based photographer who captures rocket launches with Central Florida landmarks in the foreground, such as Lake Underhill and 408. (Courtesy Pascal Fouquet)
Pascal Fouquet is an Orlando-based photographer who captures rocket launches with Central Florida landmarks in the foreground, such as Lake Underhill and 408. (Courtesy Pascal Fouquet)

See the winning images at worldphoto.org and read about Fouquet’s shot at alphauniverse.com. Follow the photographer on Instagram @pf.photography__ or online at pfphotos.art.

Find me @PConnPie on Instagram or send me an email: pconnolly@orlandosentinel.com.

Deutsche Börse prize review – from crotchless knickers to the sound of a grave

By in Photography

Deutsche Börse prize review – from crotchless knickers to the sound of a grave

I’m standing in a black box. It’s so dark I can hardly see. There are ominous scraping and scratching sounds, the distinctive chink of metal, the vexing buzz of insects reverbing through a subwoofer. The effect is bodily, a kind of reverse ASMR. It sounds like death. And it turns out that’s exactly what I’m listening to.

A sound installation devoid of visuals is a bold entry point for an exhibition of photography. But it also makes sense, since it deals with two of photography’s biggest current problems: absence and apathy. Photography’s consistent failures to see, the impossibility of describing everything in visual terms – these have become compelling subjects, and they surface in the displays by all four shortlisted artists at this year’s Deutsche Börse photography foundation prize.

The images you encounter inside the black box – an installation by Syrian-born artist Hrair Sarkissian which bears the heavy title Deathscape – are the ones you come up with yourself. Sarkissan’s argument is that seeing could never be enough. We need to get to images through action – to feel before we see, in order to understand. Deathscape is also a document of an action: the excavation of a mass grave in Spain, a citizen-led initiative to recover the bodies of relatives who met their fate under Franco’s brutal regime.

Emerging from Deathscape, there is another project by Sarkissian. At first, it looks like spartan images of generic homes – living rooms, kitchens, gardens – all hauntingly empty. After Deathscape, you’re primed to understand there’s more to this than meets the eye; these Last Seen (2018-2021) are in fact documents of absence, photographs of the last places loved ones were seen by their families, before they disappeared during conflicts in Argentina, Brazil, Lebanon, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Their names and the date of their disappearance is embossed on the image – only visible when you get up close. Their whereabouts is still unknown, leaving their relatives in agonising limbo. The emptiness of two glasses abandoned on a kitchen table becomes horrifying.

Viennese performer and pioneering feminist artist Valie Export is nominated for her retrospective The Photographs. As the show is still touring, this display has been curated as a mini-survey of Export’s work, from documents of early guerrilla performances such as her Action Pants: Genital Panic, when she paraded around a cinema in Munich in trousers from which a triangle had been removed at the crotch, to her Body Configurations, in which she literally re-inserts her body into patriarchal structures, lying, squeezing and contorting her body into grooves and alcoves of buildings that represent authority and power – a kind of urban version of Ana Mendieta’s Earth Body. There are no live colonoscopies here, though Export once had one in front of an audience. With humour, it all makes the point that the patriarchy wasn’t designed for women or their bodies.

Export is neither “now” – most of the work here was made in the 1970s – or strictly a photographer. Yet it’s easy to see how her influence has been far-reaching, from Marina Abramović (who restaged some of Export’s performances), to Carrie Mae Weems’ Museum Series and Hito Steyerl’s cyborgian feminism. Photography has been an important witness to her wild and radical interventions over the years. And the photographs – such as the artist extending her branded Valie Export pack of cigarettes towards the camera – are unforgettable.

Prix Pictet winning Gauri Gill and collaborator Rajesh Vangad are nominated for a co-authored book, Fields of Sight, which was published last year. Much of Gill’s work is devoted to telling the stories of – and with – marginalised, peripheral communities across India, challenging traditional documentary photography. This work synthesises her photographs of an Adivasi village on the coast of Maharashta, with the ornate imaginary of Vangad, a Warli painter – a traditional art form practised by the Indigenous Warli community.

Vangad was initially Gill’s guide, but recognising the impossibility of capturing the complexity and richness of the place, he became her protagonist and collaborator – her photographs a canvas for his intricate geometric motifs, representing the past, present and future of each site Gill photographed. There are stories of labour, displacement, violence and destruction – things you simply cannot see in a single image. Vangad’s painting dances across the photographs, animating them. Imagination seems to bring us closer to the truth.

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Photography doesn’t have to offer a single point of view. Lebohang Kganye’s work is an attempt to deal with this in a natural climax to the show. The room is filled with Kganye’s sepia-toned, theatrical cutouts, archival and family photographs printed at life-size scale directly on to honeycomb cardboard, and attached to supports. These scenographies represent the Kganye family’s history – her great grandparents with a herd of cattle; her grandmother who was forced off her land during apartheid and became a domestic worker stands in her kitchen, an iron heating on the stove. A typical home in a township, washing hanging on the line, materialises memories from a family photo album. As you contemplate these theatrical tableaux, the light shifts overhead, casting shadows in the place of images. Kganye, too, is concerned with absence. These cutouts are silhouettes for lives lived and for love lost, that remind us that photographs can never be stand-ins for life or love.

The Deutsche Börse – the Turner prize of the photography world – can only be as good as the art on show in the last year (artists and photographers are nominated by an international jury of experts on the basis of exhibitions or books that have taken place in Europe in the preceding 12 months). This year’s cohort converges with startling clarity in a summative survey that is in sync with the cataclysmic world outside it.

New Year’s Day, hour by hour, 2024

By in Photography

New Year’s Day, hour by hour, 2024
image

18:00

The light beyond light. Aldeburgh, Suffolk. I changed plans at the last minute and drove to this tree of light on Aldeburgh beach, which is put up every year in memory of loved ones. I recently lost my dad and even though he did not live in Aldeburgh, it felt like the perfect setting. Going there and thinking of him evoked some lovely memories, some of which felt new and some which took me back to my childhood, chasing a feather along the shore in the South of France

Photograph: Sarah Lucy Brown/24 Photography

Life in Bronze

By in Sculpture

Life in Bronze
Bengaluru-based artist Dimpy Menon’s bronze sculptures at Gallery Art Positive in Delhi celebrate life through graceful athletic figures and universal body language.

Edward Burtynsky on climate, abstraction, and hanging photos like paintings

By in Photography

Edward Burtynsky on climate, abstraction, and hanging photos like paintings
Pengah Wall #1, Komodo National Park, Indonesia, 2017. All images © Edward Burtynsky. Courtesy Flowers Gallery, London

The Canadian artist has captured our scars on the planet for over four decades. His largest ever show is a rallying cry with multiple voices

Edward Burtynsky is standing in front of the most ambitious and labour-intensive photograph he has ever made. It is a blanket of golf-ball sized orbs and growths in pink, orange, green and brown, unfurling across an entire wall in London’s Saatchi Gallery.

Pengah Wall #1 is an underwater photograph – or rather, a digital image composed of around 200 individual shots – made off the coast of Komodo Island in Indonesia in 2017. Burtynsky stands back slightly and admires the coral, its fleshy, sprouting texture lending a sense of alien vitality. He mentions the work of painter Jackson Pollock; the idea was to emulate the motion and energy of his canvases in the image. “Abstract Expressionism was one of the things I loved in 20th-century art,” the Canadian photographer says. “That there is no singular central point in the images, and their all-overness, texture and modulation – the whole surface has been considered.”

In terms of production cost, the reef image dwarfs anything else that Burtynsky has made. Six photographers and six professional divers ventured to a depth of 60 feet to divide the coral into a grid; they then moved slowly up and down making photographs of the shifting seabed, returning intermittently to a boat with a 30-strong crew to examine their pictures on screen. The swirling currents presented a challenge, as did needing to illuminate the reef manually. A Photoshop expert then worked for three months to stitch the final image together, meticulously selecting when to splice and blend each tendril to create a smooth, almost one-to-one scale composition. “It’s speaking to biodiversity on a level that is almost hard to comprehend,” Burtynsky reflects.

Nickel Tailings #34, Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, 1996

Tailings Pond #2, Wesselton Diamond Mine, Kimberley, Northern Cape, South Africa, 2018

The extent of human extraction and infrastructure, and their impact on the planet has been Burtynsky’s subject for over four decades. As a first-year student at Ryerson (now Toronto Metropolitan University), he was tasked to ‘go out and find evidence of man’, sparking a curiosity in the environment which picked up pace in the early 1980s, when he stumbled across an enormous mine while wandering around Pennsylvania. He has since made pictures of industrial ingenuity – and fallout – across North America, Russia, Kenya, Iceland, Saudi Arabia, Australia and scores of other countries. Extraction / Abstraction is his largest show to-date, featuring 94 large-format images, the immersive mural work In the Wake of Progress, an augmented reality piece (which Burtynsky calls “photography 3.0”) and a display of equipment and shoot ephemera. 

The extraction theme in Burtynsky’s work is clear, but what about abstraction? He continues to draw parallels with the New York School, and their “treatment of the whole surface as active and the compression of space” which led the photographer to start viewing his own images as canvases. Conversations with longtime friend and Extraction / Abstraction curator Marc Mayer led to a unique approach at the Saatchi, in which Burtynsky’s images are grouped according to harmonies in colour, texture and visual language rather than series or location. “These first three rooms are almost as if you’re going through a painting show,” Burtynsky says. And the 60 by 80 inch prints “allow you to have more of a bodily experience of the work. The smaller it gets the more cerebral it gets – here you’re enveloped in the space.”

Burtynsky’s projects like Quarries, Water, Oil, Salt Pans and African Studies often comprise pictures from across several locations or, like China, rove around a region and feature several industries, from chicken processing to shipbuilding. The photographs hang in mixed series at the Saatchi, farmland in Spain and Ethiopia alongside Turkish lakes and Mexican irrigation systems. Themed groupings return later in the show, with the rooms titled Agriculture, Extraction, Manufacturing, Infrastructure and Waste. Burtynsky has said in the past that he works in “arcs” or “buckets where I can fit different ideas”. This means that broad topics such as ‘Water’ can be explored in “poetic and interpretative” ways without striving for exhaustive documentation. Here the arcs coalesce, mixing and matching across the globe to dizzying effect – a true representation of the multiplicity of our ecological impact.

Spirit Aerosystems, Boeing 373 Fuselage Assembly Plant, Wichita, Kansas, USA, 2018

One of the aims of Extraction / Abstraction is to create a kind of disorientation – to defamiliarise Burtynsky’s subject matter by transcending geographic and thematic contexts in favour of aesthetics. He wants there to be a sense of “Where am I?” and “What am I looking at?” in the opening galleries, he explains. This is rare in photography, where the first questions asked of a work tend to be “What is it?” and “Where and when was it taken?” The approach puts more emphasis on tone, texture, lighting, and perspective. There is an irony in the fact that curating images like paintings prompts technical questions about photo composition, even while Burtynsky’s longstanding interest in the surreal and the sublime linger in shots of mines, quarries and hundreds of acres of farmland. 

Small tiles of wall text give viewers context on each image, though Burtynsky easily recalls the location and story behind each shot as he guides me through the show. He approaches Thjorsá River #1, Southern Region, Iceland, 2012, an aerial survey of silt formations along the country’s longest river. It’s a rich, inky work which looks part-nautical, part-astronomical – perhaps even computer generated. “This is a river Delta where the glacial run-off is braiding on the final stages of the delta before it exits out into the ocean,” Burtynsky says. “So you get a lot of glacial till that’s in the water so it gives you that opacity… those beautiful opaque tones.” The image is particularly beguiling, with light grey blotches iterated across the print like a painterly motif.

The impulse towards abstraction is clear in Burtynsky’s description – the blurring of the physical landscape’s aesthetic properties with those of the photograph itself. Because of the location’s remoteness and the uniqueness of Burtynsky’s aerial vantage point, describing the image and subject as one makes sense. It is likely that viewers will never see many of Burtynsyk’s natural phenomena for themselves, and with climate breakdown changing the landscape irrevocably, there is an elegiac quality to a show which also asks fundamental questions about photography’s commemorative role.

Thjorsá River #1, Southern Region, Iceland, 2012

“We’re in challenging times… It’s tragic that planetary health is becoming a political football”

Salinas #2, Cádiz, Spain, 2013

Shipbreaking #13, Chittagong, Bangladesh, 2000

Oil Bunkering #9, Niger Delta, Nigeria, 2016

We continue around the Saatchi, traversing the globe through pictures. Erosion Control #11, Burdur, Burdur Province, Türkiye, 2022 shows human footprints breaking through white salt flats, leaving hundreds of black dots. Burtynsky didn’t quite know what he was seeing from the plane above, he tells me, comparing the landscape to “stretched fish or eel skin”. Again his desire to defamiliarise the landscape into something abstract or bodily is clear.

Lagos is a place of particular fascination. A 2016 photograph shows illegally logged timber floating across down the Makoko lagoon, soon to be exported or driven into the silt to continue the floating settlement’s expansion. The deforestation is devastating, but Burtynsky marvels at the ingenuity required to serve Lagos’ rapidly growing population (which could reach 25 million by 2035). “The whole world has recreated itself on these stilts,” he says. It is a prime example of his work’s latent ambiguity, where environmental destruction sits alongside – and is often indivisible from – the infrastructure needed to sustain our current way of life.

The climate crisis is an inevitable topic on which Burtynsky is often probed. (He recently took part in a climate-themed event with former governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney). It is striking that his image-making has spanned the most intense period of climate awareness, from tentative warning signs to a wailing, terrifying alarm bell. In 2013, he said that “I don’t see myself as a card-carrying activist at all, but I do see myself as an advocate or a concerned citizen for sustainability.” What does he think now?

“We’re in challenging times,” Burtynsky says with a laugh of acknowledged understatement. “God forbid the wrong politician gets in in America, let’s say, and all of a sudden it’s free for all again. It’s tragic that planetary health is becoming a political football.”

Saw Mills #2, Lagos, Nigeria, 2016

But there is hope in his recent work. Pengah Wall #1 is part of Anthropocene, a roving project which aims to progress the environmental debate “by being revelatory and not accusatory”. Nairobi landfill sits alongside thousands of flood-damaged cars in Texas, slum roofs in Mumbai and the lush vegetation of Vancouver island in work which spans a documentary film and an interactive website. “It is about ending on hope – the fact that we still have biodiversity with us,” Burtynsky says.

There is also an eye on the future. The augmented reality project allows visitors to view a rusted car engine from Accra and other scrap objects in rich detail. The equipment display – Phase One and Hasselblad cameras, 3D printed elephant tusks, a range of gimbals and camera stabilisers – points to a love for pushing the boundaries of image-making, as do Burtynsky’s anecdotes about shooting from helicopters and Cessna planes. His photographs may have made the world smaller, showing destinations that viewers might never have previously imagined, but he appears intent on demystifying each composition, despite the reverence for the elliptical world of abstraction. 

It is this genuine fascination with the natural and industrial worlds which seems to drive him forward. Burtynsky marvels at the 250km of access shafts drilled into the banks of the Yangtze river to create the Xiluodu Dam; at the Huajian Shoe Factory in Ethiopia; at the order and visual coherence of the Spirit AeroSystems factory in Kansas. “I don’t approach my image-making as conventional documentary, saying ‘I’m going to take you through a tour of how people make salt in twenty images’,” he explains. “I’m interested in the picture, in the landscape and how it’s transformed – the human imprint in that landscape.”

Ravi Ghosh

Ravi Ghosh is the deputy editor at British Journal of Photography. Previously, he was an editor at Elephant magazine and worked on the Life & Arts supplement at the Financial Times. He writes on arts and culture for The Guardian, Prospect, Tribune, i-D, Bandcamp, RA Magazine and more. He has also written photobook introductions for Tony Mak and Portrait of Humanity.

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